'The Red Piano' is on page 23.

Book lovers all over Australia are currently receiving a copy of the Summer Reading Guide inserted into their weekend newspaper. This year, we’re delighted to see our title The Red Piano is in it.

The Summer Reading Guide is a bit of an institution. Produced for many years now by two of Australia’s leading independent booksellers, Melbourne’s Readings and Sydney’s Gleebooks, it is also used by quality independent booksellers across Australia, such as Brisbane’s Avid Reader, Coaldrakes, Folio Books and Riverbend Books. (I’ll try to get a complete list.)

Quoth the guide:

The Red Piano is a retelling of the story of Zhu Xiao-Mei, a concert pianist who was ‘reeducated’ as a child in the camps of China’s Cultural Revolution. After long days toiling in the fields and undertaking self-criticism classes, the small girl slips away to illicitly practise the piano. Music brings some humanity into her life, in a system that has none. It brings happiness and a hint of freedom. Barroux’s stark artwork highlights the poignancy of this tale of human resilience in the face of oppression. Published in association with Amnesty International. Ages 9+

For an independent publisher, there’s no better place to have your books featured this close to Christmas. You can’t buy The Red Piano on Amazon, so the best place to buy it from is an independent bookshop like the ones mentioned above (or see our Google map of  ’The Red Piano’ stockists).

From the website of the National Gallery of Scotland:

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 7 November 2009 — 7 February 2010

Paul Sandby, "Windsor Castle from Datchet Lane on a Rejoicing Night," Photograph: The Royal Collection © 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain looks at all aspects of Sandby’s career and includes studies of rural and urban views, street scenes, royal parks and ancient castles. Sandby explored a broader range of subject matter than any previous artist in Britain and was integral in refining the use of watercolour. This exhibition features over one hundred loans, including oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, prints and sketchbooks, coming from all the major collections which house his work: The Royal Collection, The British Museum, The British Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Yale Center for British Art. It also showcases outstanding works from private collections.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Addressing the exhibition in The Gaurdian (7 November 2009), Linda Colley describes Sandby’s standing in British society, then and now:

Stephen Daniels, et al (London: Royal Academy of Arts), ISBN: 978-1905711482, 216 pages, $55

. . . As George III’s remark illustrates, this view of him has always been coloured by varieties of snobbery. To this extent, the portrait of Sandby by Francis Cotes, showing him leaning out of a country house window, sketchbook in hand, can be seen as a calculated puff by a close friend. It accurately conveys Sandby’s good looks and pleasant temperament. But the portrait gives a flatteringly deceptive impression of a man as much at ease in polite and leisured interiors as he is with nature. In reality, Sandby’s family background was considerably more humble than that of Gainsborough or John Constable. Unlike his fellow academician Joshua Reynolds, Sandby was never a fashionable, expensive portrait painter. Nor was he a practitioner of academically prestigious history painting. And, crucially, unlike JMW Turner or Thomas Girtin, Sandby was not a metropolitan.

The son of a framework knitter, he was baptised in Nottingham in 1731; and this exhibition is very much a Nottingham achievement, where it was first displayed. The show, opening today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in March, was conceived by Stephen Daniels of Nottingham University. It is exactly the sort of deeply researched and ambitious regional art exhibition that is likely to be rendered increasingly impracticable because of government, municipal and corporate spending cuts. . . .

Sandby’s vision then is substantially (not entirely) loyalist and conventionally patriotic, and this may be another reason why his work is sometimes passed over. Morning, an extraordinary painting of a massive, venerable beech tree set firm in a Shropshire landscape, is, for instance, a powerfully loyalist testament. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, five years after the fall of the Bastille and in the midst of war, the painting would have been understood as an allusion to contemporary conservative celebrations of an ancient, organic British constitution as against the recent republican outgrowths of revolutionary France. As the exhibition catalogue argues, Sandby’s vision was also increasingly a Britannic one. Like Turner, Sandby made repeated tours throughout Wales and Scotland, representing not just their scenic and cultural differences, but also the ways in which these countries were undergoing change and becoming in some respects far more closely linked with England. . . .

For the full article, click here»

To order from the Spring Mini Catalogue!! Oh My Goodness that came around too quickly. You can download a pdf here or view it online here.

Then as soon as you decide what you just have to have contact me and we’ll put an order through for you. Call/sms: 0406 057 751 Email: hcarruthers@live.com I’ll need your order by Monday 30th Nov no later than 7pm (WAST {West Australian standard time})

From the Museum Van Loon website:

Jurriaan Andriessen (1742-1819): A Beautiful View
Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, 2 October 2009 — 4 January 2010

Jurriaan Andriessen, 1780

The exhibition Jurriaan Andriessen (1742-1819): een schoon vergezicht . . .  is the very first solo exhibition of this famous eighteenth-century wall panel painter, with works from — amongst others — the Rijksmuseum, the City Archives, and the Archive of the Royal Household, many of which have not been on display earlier. The occasion of this exhibition is the . . . ­completed restoration of the six Andriessen wall panels in the collection of the Museum Van Loon. Andriessen manufactured the paintings in 1780 for Drakensteyn Castle, where Princess Beatrix lived before her accession to the throne. Professor Maurits van Loon acquired the panels in the 1970s as a result of the special relationship between Drakensteyn Castle and the Van Loon house. Since those days, they embellish the wall of the ‘Drakensteyn Room’ in the museum. It is the only Andriessen ensemble presently open to the public.

In the eighteenth century, wall panels were a true trend in Dutch interiors. Contrary to present day wallpaper, they were actual paintings, mostly landscapes with wall-to-wall displays that made people feel ‘outside on the inside’. Jurriaan Andriessen was particularly popular in his day and had many commissions both in Amsterdam and the country. With the exhibition comes a publication: Richard Harmanni, Tonko Grever, and Laura Smeets, Jurriaan Andriessen (1742-1819): A Beautiful View (Zwolle, Waanders, 2009), ISBN: 9789040076534, $29.

From the Met’s press release:

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 12 October 2009 – 24 January 2010

Ralph Earl, "Elijah Boardman," 1789 (NY: Met)

From the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I, many of America’s most acclaimed painters captured in their finest works the temperament of their respective eras. They recorded and defined the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 brings together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic pictures that tell compelling stories of life’s tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in more than 35 years, the exhibition includes loans from leading museums and private lenders—and many paintings from the Metropolitan’s own distinguished collection. American Stories features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and notable works by some of their key colleagues.

The exhibition examines stories based on familiar experience and the means by which painters told their stories through their choices of settings, players, action, and various narrative devices. The artists’ responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations are examined, as are their evolving styles and standards of storytelling in relation to the themes of childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the production and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes towards race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of art making.

The exhibition is arranged in four chronological sections. The first—Inventing American Stories, 1765–1830—begins with artists who told stories through portraits. Serving their sitters’ self-conscious interest in how they appeared in the eyes of others, American portraitists often emulated British compositions. Although these artists focused on individuals and particular locales and relationships, the cleverest of them responded to broader narrative agendas and to the natural impulse to tell stories. In his portrait of his colleague Paul Revere (1768, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), John Singleton Copley embedded subtle narrative into a traditional single-figure format, with the silversmith’s gestures and gaze conveying volumes about the time in which he lived. As their patrons learned to read portraits for more than likeness and to appreciate artistic license, portraitists began to gratify their sitters by telling subtle personal stories in increasingly elaborate compositions. In his ingenious double-likeness of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788, National Gallery of Art, Washington), for instance, Charles Willson Peale implied the sexual bond that defined the Lamings’ marriage. Later in this period, some painters told grand stories in pictures produced for public exhibition, rather than purely for private enjoyment. In Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago), Samuel F. B. Morse proposed that his compatriots must achieve cultural independence from Europe even while they learned from the Old World’s greatest artistic achievements.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

In addition to the materials contained at the Met’s website, there is an exhibition blog that’s updated regularly. The November 2009 issue of The Magazine Antiques includes an instructive article by Carrie Barratt and H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists as They Saw Themselves.”

November marks the launch of the 2009 Archive Awareness campaign. The theme this year is “take flight!”

On the theme of flight here is a short article by Tish at our Bradford office about some interesting entertainments in Peel Park, Bradford. The images are from Bradford Borough Council, Town Clerk, papers regarding Peel Park, 1D82.

Advertisement for acrobatic entertainer Signor Farinelli enclosed with letter dated 31 May 1856 from Charles Henry Brown explaining that Mr Coxwell will not be able to make an ascent from Bradford and that William Stewart could make the ascent with a new balloon, and suggesting an ascent by Madame Rossini or Signor Farinelli. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford: 1D82/3/4

Peel Park was the first publicly owned park in Bradford. Sir Robert Peel died in 1850 and a meeting was held in Bradford to discuss how he could be commemorated; it was agreed that a park would be a fitting memorial. A Central Committee of the Bradford Public Park Movement was set up which in turn organised District Committees. Land for the park was purchased during the 1850s but it took twelve years to pay off the debts incurred in buying the land and laying it out as a park. A donation of £1,500 was made by the Government and donations of £1,000 were received from Milligan, Forbes and Company and from Titus Salt. There were also numerous private subscriptions and some of the documents in this collection refer to the need to canvass for subscriptions.

In addition galas were held at the Park to raise money for the Park Fund; various attractions were ‘hired’ by the Committee and some of the letters and agreements in this collection refer to entertainers and to a proposed balloon ascent by Mr Coxwell. The agreements also made provision for indoor venues in case of inclement weather (poor summers are obviously nothing new!).

Newspaper advertisement for Madam Rossini’s act enclosed with a letter from Charles H Brown dated 2 Jun 1856 regarding Madam Rossini's performance at Peel Park. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford: 1D82/3/5

Firework displays were also a feature of the galas; unfortunately in 1863 the promised “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Fall of Herculaneum” was a great disappointment and produced very little light. As the park had a lake there were also aquatic displays and one entertainer was pulled across the lake in a washtub drawn by geese. He also arranged for some nymphs to be pulled across the lake by swans but apparently the accompanying fireworks smoked so much that the nymphs could not be seen (one of the letter books in this collection contains a reference to a request for two swans).

The profits from the gala held in 1863 finally wiped out all the debts and the park was handed over to the Bradford Corporation. However the galas continued to be held (profits were given to Bradford Hospitals) and some of the letters in this collection refer to negotiations with railway companies for excursion trains and special fares for visitors to the galas. The final gala was held in1936; by that time people were able to travel further afield for their entertainment.

You can find out more about the archive awareness campaign at http://www.archiveawareness.com/

Hey

Click the Picture below to view the Catalog. The cheats are below:

On the 1st page click the middle of the Modern Chair – Coat Rack

On the 3rd page click the Snow Tower next to the word Fort – Fireplace

On the 5th page click the purple brick near the Top of the Iron Gate (Quite Tricky) – Puffle Jack ‘O Lantern

On the 7th page click the Sad-Looking Lantern – LCD Television

On the 7th page click the middle of the Grave Stone – Goofy Jack ‘O Lantern

In the Clearance Section Click the Grill on the Ticket Booth – Piano

Click the top left of the Window – Bowling Alley

Click the Knobs on the left of the Electric Stove – Fridge

Waddle On

Eddersm

Hey

Click the Catalog to view it, the cheats are located below:

Click the Crowbar on the 4th page – Secret Stone Igloo

Click the Door of the Deluxe Snow Igloo – Secret Deluxe Snow Igloo

Waddle On

Eddersm

I wish I could tell you that the most read book in our house is perhaps a collection of French prose,  or Ulysses, or even Dan Brown. Something intellectual, something stimulating. Something for the four of us to debate long into the night over cheap port and Maltesers. Or even just during the commercial breaks in the X Factor.

Sadly not. It is in fact the Argos catalogue. Thousands of pages offering everything from beds to bedknobs; dog beds to dogs (well you never know)…all available by phone or online. Or even by actually moving and visiting a store.

Catalogues seem to spring to life at this time of the year. The children, previously barred from mentioning the C word until mid November, have now been unshackled and are rapidly assembling Christmas lists with the Argos book of dreams playing a key role in their deliberations.

And I am more than happy to join them. Catalogues have played a key role in British households for decades and ours was no exception. I seem to recall Littlewoods and Grattans as a spotty teenager. Of course back then all that interested me were the toys, occasional fashion pages (“get your Bay City Rollers bell bottoms here!”) and mainly the underwear section….for many adolescents their first furtive glimpse into the complex and frankly intimidating world of female undergarments.

Not a lot has changed. Sadly Argos does not provide such a key educational service but for some reason both myself and wife are still keen on the Next catalogue. I wonder what she’s looking at?

I always have too many books and magazines on my end table.  I get ideas and go digging for stuff to help me decide and I have even more on my table.  I try to clean it off once a month, but it’s more apt to be two or three.  I was very surprised at the number of catalogues that I had every intension of looking through and never did.  Why do I get them?  Some, like Patternworks, I haven’t bought from for ten years.  Most I also get e-mails from.  It makes me crazy.

I cased this card from a fellow SU! demo and I believe her name was Deb. If you know exactly who I’m talking about please leave a comment. I originally copied the idea pretty much exactly and then realised if I did a little bit of colour changing it’d make a great Chrissy card.

Eastern Blooms for Christmas!

I know you might be thinking but this isn’t a Christmas set! And you’re totally right but all of the ladies in class loved the idea of using something non-christmassy to make something christmassy! Make sense?? I’m a total believer in using what you have so if you don’t have a xmas set and can’t really afford to buy some right now, think of ways you can use what you have.

If you want to know more about making this card or you’d like to order your Ski Slope papers before they are gone contact me today! Call/sms: 0406 057 751 Email: hcarruthers@live.com

Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C., 10 November 2009 — 7 March 2010

Curated by Rachel Kent

Yinka Shonibare, "The Swing (After Fragonard)," 2001

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, "The Swing," 1767 (London: Wallace Collection)

This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg profiled the Yinka Shonibare exhibition now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (it was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney). Writing in The New York Times (17 June 2009) of the show when it was at the Brooklyn Museum this past summer, Deborah Sontag described Shonibare as an “erudite and wide-ranging” artist, whom

Rachel Kent

at 47, is a senior figure in the British art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. A disabled black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes — “That’s the point of my work really,” he said — Mr. Shonibare makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability, colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly. “I don’t produce propaganda art,” he said. “I’m more interested in the poetic than the didactic.”

While many of the works address contemporary issues through Victorian conventions, there are intriguing eighteenth-century references, too — including this reworking of Fragonard’s Swing.

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Umberto Eco served as guest-curator for the Louvre’s current exhibition Vertige de la Liste (Vertigo of Lists), on view until December 13. The scholar’s celebrity status has garnered lots of attention for the show (in addition to being taken up by the Associated Press, it’s been covered by Spiegel, Salon, and L’Express). The publisher’s description of the book accompanying the show, calls Eco “a modern-day Diderot,” explaining that here he “examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic.” With material ranging from ancient and medieval lists (Homeric catalogues and lists of saints) to early modern “catalogues of plants [and] collections of art,” the eighteenth century would seem like a crucial period, and there is apparently at least one painting by Panini included. Still, for all of the talk of lists, one that seems to be missing (even from the Louvre’s site) is an exhibition checklist. Those of us who are unable to see the show should, however, have a better sense of its contents soon enough; the English edition of The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay is schedule for publication on November 17.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Vertige de la Liste
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2 November — 13 December 2009

The following account of the exhibition comes from Cristina Carrillo De Albornoz’s coverage in The Art Newspaper:

After Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer and Pierre Boulez, Umberto Eco is the next special guest curator of the Louvre. A noted historian and semiotician before he brought these sensibilities to bear on major novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco has spent almost two years in residence at the Louvre. His chosen subject is “The Infinity of Lists”, a tour through art, literature and music based on the theme of lists and motivated by his fascination with numbers (until 13 December). “The subject of lists has been a theme of many writers from Homer onwards. My great challenge was to transfer it to painting and music and to see whether I could find equivalents in the Louvre, because frankly when I suggested the subject I had no idea how I would write about visual lists,” says Eco.

“The starting point for my ‘list of lists’ was Homer’s Iliad: firstly the creation of Achilles’ shield by Hephaestus, which not only symbolises perfect form but is in itself a work of art on which is engraved what is considered an allegory of the creation of the universe, an overall vision of Homer’s world. And secondly, the part where he lists all the ships leaving for the Trojan war.” Eco plays with these two opposing dimensions—perfect form and the list—in an attempt to rationalise the world. “The shield of Achilles is the epiphany of form, and every picture in an artist’s search for that form is a shield of Achilles,” concludes Eco. “Behind each list is the sense of ineffability.”

This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a “giddiness of lists” but shows how in the right hands it can be a “poetics of catalogues.” From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times. . . .

For the full article, click here»

Hello Penguins! The new play came out today: Norman Swarm has shrunk and as we all know is located on the stage, the Board of Works:

So stay inside:

I know, Club Penguin always brings more than a little surprise …!!! This time brought a new Club Penguin Play: Norman Swarm has Transformed, we work with it an exclusive room of the play, Look at:

In this room there is a Magical Phial Pin! look at it: It also emerged a new edition of “The Costume Trunk” is not work no secret why I bring only the cover:

Today we can send new cards and you know why? Yes! already left for another 5 new cards to send to your little friends!

The New Room is now officially out and for members only, if you enter the new room you have to do the following:

• You have to buy the amulet in the catalog “Martial Artworks”

• Then you have to click the Next label:

• Open a portal where you will…

• The New Room: Dojo-Fire:

(click image to see swf format)

On entering you will notice a change www.clubpenguin.com No? that change is good for the new room on the volcano as well as car parks all Ninjas penguin suit and car parks of the Volcano:

(click image to see The image)

See you soon

The British Library are beta testing a new online catalogue.

It features a simple seach box, book covers, RSS feeds, bookmarking, personal workspace, and links out to Google Books.

BL are asking for feedback.

It’s shaping up to be quite an autumn for French drawing exhibitions in the United States. In addition to the shows at the Getty, the Frick, and the Morgan, the National Gallery presents a sampling from its permanent collection. As noted in a press release from the museum’s website:

Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800
National Gallery, Washington D.C., 1 October 2009 — 31 January 2010

Margaret Grasselli, ISBN 978-1848220430

Some 135 of the most significant and beautiful drawings made over a period of three centuries by the best French artists working at home and abroad and by foreign artists working in France will be on view in Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800 in the Gallery’s West Building from October 1, 2009, through January 31, 2010. This is the first comprehensive exhibition and catalogue to focus on the Gallery’s permanent collection of French old master drawings, which is remarkable for its breadth, depth, and individual masterpieces. “One of the true glories of the National Gallery of Art’s holdings of graphic art is its outstanding collection of French old master drawings,” said Earl Powell, director, National Gallery of Art. “The exhibition Renaissance to Revolution and the accompanying catalogue celebrate the singular originality, elegance, and spirit of French draftsmanship.”

Antoine Coypel, "Seated Faun," 1700/1705, red and black chalk heightened with white chalk on blue paper, 16 x 11 inches (DC: NGA)

Among the National Gallery of Art’s extensive holdings of approximately 100,000 works on paper, the collection of 6,000 European drawings includes more than 900 French old master drawings which stand out as a particular treasure. The French group has deep roots in the earliest days of the museum’s existence, with the first of these works arriving in 1942, just a year after the Gallery opened its doors to the public. Over the next 67 years, thanks to the generosity of innumerable donors, the collection has evolved into one the Gallery’s strongest and most comprehensive, and one of the finest in the Western Hemisphere.

Organized chronologically, Renaissance to Revolution presents a visual journey through the development of drawing in France, from its first flowering during the Renaissance through its neoclassical incarnation during the political and social upheavals of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Lorrain, and Antoine Watteau, as well as many less well-known artists. All major stylistic trends and many of the greatest and best-known artists from these centuries are represented by a rich array of works executed in a variety of styles and media and covering a wide range of functions, subjects, and genres. . . .

François-André Vincent, "The Drawing Lesson," 1777, brush and brown wash over graphite, 13 x 15 inches (DC: NGA)

Within the exceptionally rich collection of eighteenth-century drawings, the major artists—Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Hubert Robert, and Watteau, among others—are each represented by several works of outstanding quality. Some magnificent pieces by less familiar masters are featured as well, including François-André Vincent’s Drawing Lesson (1777), arguably the most perfect representation of eighteenth-century French elegance, taste, and gallantry; Étienne-Louis Boullée’s monumental neoclassical design for a metropolitan church from 1780/1781; and a large and beautiful pastoral scene executed in pastel and gouache, Shepherds Resting by a Stream (1779) by Jean-Baptiste Pillement. Also noteworthy is a striking group of portraits by several of the leading pastellists of the period, including outstanding examples by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, as well as a particularly dashing portrait of a young woman by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard from 1787. One of the youngest drawings in the exhibition is the neoclassical portrait Thirius de Pautrizel (1795) by David, an active participant in the revolution, made when he was imprisoned for his radical politics.

A particular strength within the Gallery’s collection of French drawings is the genre of book illustration. This is represented throughout the exhibition beginning with the work by Poyet and includes distinctive pieces by such famous masters as Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger, and Saint-Aubin, as well as outstanding examples by other supremely gifted but less widely known artists, such as Hubert-François Gravelot and Charles Eisen.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art, is curator of the exhibition. Published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800 features an introductory essay and comprehensive entries on the exhibited drawings with 260 full-color illustrations.

On Sunday, 13 December 2009, at 2pm, Grasselli will deliver the lecture Playing Favorites: A Personal Selection of French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art and sign copies of the catalogue.

No bookish posts today.

Here’s why:

We all know I’m no Martha Stewart (though I’d really like to be). Way back in July, Tom and Huck were with me at the local craft store, and, while I was shopping, they each selected some fabric from the clearance table. Tom chose a skateboard-themed fabric (2 yards for $3) and Huck chose a football-themed fabric (1 yard for $2). They wanted me, their mother, to sew pillow cases for their beds.

I don’t sew very often, and I only know how to use a sewing machine to sew straight lines.

“I don’t know, guys,” I said. “Maybe Aunt Sarah can do this for you.” (Aunt Sarah is my aunt and she is an amazing designer and seamstress who had her own clothing shop for many years. She is a professional, and everything she sews looks fantastic.)

Huck then said, “I love it when you make me homemade things.”

And my heart melted.

I bought the fabric, with that wishful and probably arrogant motherly thinking that they would each think of me every time they rested their heads on the pillows. I was determined to sew their pillowcases myself.

Just as soon as I went to Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

Just as soon as our family took our summer vacation.

Just as soon as I quoted that big book to a library.

Just as soon as school started for Tom and Huck.

Just as soon as the Santa Monica Book Fair, the Central Valley Antiquarian Book Fair, and the Golden Gate Park Book Fair were finished.

Finally, I decided I had better just do it. And, there it is, pictured above. It only took me about an hour to cut, press, pin, and sew.

I need to apply this attitude — just do it regardless of other priorities — to the Dante catalogue.

Just as soon as I sew a skateboard pillowcase for Tom tomorrow.

Hi Duckwit,

Just to let you know, I wil be posting a bit later and more often in the next few days. I have some very important news to share.

I will be back to post soon.

That’s not all for now!

Today’s book is On the Edge of the Millennium: New Art from China, by Michael Goedhuis. Softcover published 2002 by Goedhuis Contemporary. 47 pages; full-page color photos. Cover shows detail of ‘Interior with Mosquitoes and Moths’ by Guo Wei.

This is an exhibition catalogue for 2002 show at the gallery’s New York and London locations.  Full-page color photos and a short essay are provided for each of the artists:  Zhou Tiehai, Zhou Chunya, Shen Xiaotong, Geng Jianyi, Mao Yan, Zhao Nengzhi, Gu Gan, Guo Jin, Guo Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Ding Yi, Hong Hao, Hai Bo, Zhao Bandi, Yu Hong, Wang Jinsong, Wang Dongling, and Qiu Deshu.

The well-written Introduction by Michael Goedhuis briefly discusses the history of art in China in the past hundred years:

Chinese art of the twentieth century developed falteringly between the dominant influences of European aesthetics at the beginning of the century and Western, mostly American, modernism at the end.  At the same time it incorporated an ambivalent relationship with the powerful, albeit fading, legacy of its historic culture. – p. 2.

Goedhuis describes how the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the political control of the Cultural Revolution relentlessly impeded the development of free artistic expression.  By the 1980s the cultural situation began to change for the better, and artists began a period of intense experimentation with, and exploration of, modern Western art.  Now the artists have become more self-assured and less deferential to Western art and the Western art market:

So, although the artistic environment is extremely complex in China today, with striking regional differences and many different styles, some more traditional, others more Western, jostling for prominence, a new completely Chinese sensibility has taken hold in the last few years.  It has enabled Chinese artists, for the first time in a century, to face up to international criteria with a quiet self-confidence — no longer the idiosyncratic chroniclers of a desperate and mysterious passage in history but men and women willing and able to compete on their own terms as artists of the world. – p. 5.

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Also currently in stock at BrainiacBooks.com:

The Paintings of Wang Jinsong – Goedhuis Contemporary, New York, 20th November – 3rd December, 2002

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